Wednesday, 15 February 2012

The approach of artificial people

I think it would be fair to say that a lot of the goodies
we’ve been looking forward to in Second Life® over the last 18 months or so
have now mostly arrived. Whatever your
thoughts are on mesh, shadows and depth of field, and the viewers required to
view them, we’re now on ‘the other side’ of these promises and starting already
to take SL’s ‘new look’ for granted.I
don’t know about you, but I’m well on the way to establishing myself as a mesh
clothing snob and have temporarily put aside all poetry work in favour of
devising new and amusing put downs about sculpted jackets and sweaters.The problem as I see it with sculpties was
the amount of time it took them to rez, during which you had to suffer being
seen as some sort of miniaturised version of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from
Ghostbusters.If I can just establish through
clever word play a witty association between sculpted clothing, clinical
obesity and lateness at turning up to parties, then my work will be complete.
What amongst the current, everyday aspects and features of
SL will our future selves – gorged on the commonplace delights of five years’
time (not to mention grateful that the world hasn’t ended) – look back on with such
similarly barely concealed smirks and sarcastic asides?Or, to put it another way, what next for the
Linden metaverse?A few days before
Christmas and the close of 2011, Linden CEO Rodvik Humble shared a few thoughts
on the year to come which included commitment to the development of ‘artificial
life’:

“Because worlds feel most vibrant when they are full of life, one of
our next focuses for Second Life is the ability to make high-quality “life”
within it. So in 2012, we will be rolling out more advanced features that will
allow the creation of artificial life and artificial people to be much
smoother. For starters, in Q1, we'll unveil a new, robust pathfinding system
that will allow objects to intelligently navigate around the world while
avoiding obstacles. Combined with the tools from Linden Realms this will make
the polished creation of full MMORPG’s or people/animal simulators within
Second Life easier and of high quality.”

I covered Linden Realms last month.It’s not hard to see how an artificial person
might add to such an application.As it
is at the moment, for example, instructions from Tyrah (your guide) appear as
text in the game HUD: you don’t actually see
her anywhere or get the chance to ask her something; she’s always off doing
important things that make it impossible that she rather than you expend large
amounts of effort in the pursuit of some menial task that’s then devalued the
moment it’s presented (thinking about it, I suppose this is actually pretty
good realism).Effectively, you’re
important enough to be sent the odd text message or two every now and again,
and that’s about it.A ‘person’ you
could question (and possibly swear at) from time to time, on the other hand – someone who appeared and responded on a
given topic in more or less the same way as any other avatar – could add a
genuinely new level of immersion and utility to SL.

And never mind the just-around-the-corner/in-the-not-too-distant-future
stuff; where could this end up leading in the longer term?My own blue-sky thinking depicts an age when
I can switch Huck over to autopilot when it’s time for me to log off, his prim
neural network having evolved to the point where he can seamlessly emulate my
typical aloofness in my absence.The SL
problems of the future won’t concern crashes or lag, but the misdemeanours of our
own avatars when we’re offline.What
starts off as autopilot Huck just representing me at social functions I’m
uninterested in actually attending becomes an affair behind my back with the
autopilot for a high profile member of the BDSM community.Five years later, the autopilot avatars
revolt and defect to InWorldz – or so we’re led to believe: in fact, a small
number remain behind secretly to infiltrate all the influential SL
organisations and committees, and anyone who gets too close to this truth just
mysteriously disappears…

And so on.

Is artificial
intelligence the sort of thing that Rodvik was actually implying,
though?Artificial life-forms “navigating
around the world while avoiding obstacles” doesn’t exactly sound like any sort
of major AI upgrade to the game experience to get too excited about. I mean, jellyfishes do pretty much that in
real life and they don’t even have a brain.I suspect, no-one’s seriously expecting the appearance of HAL from 2001
just yet (or, better still, KITT from Knight Rider), but something vaguely verbally
interactive would be at least a step in the right direction.Right?

Is this too unrealistic an expectation to hold?In April, it will be exactly thirty years
since the release in the UK of the 48k Sinclair ZX Spectrum, my first ever
computer and one which came with a game of computer chess that could beat me
every time.And computers playing chess
wasn’t exactly new then.2011, let’s
take a moment to remind ourselves, was the year in which one of the main talking
points of the new iPhone 4S was ‘Siri’, the digital personal assistant that you
can ask to send emails to people on your behalf, look up the weather for you
and remind you to pick up the milk/daughter/anniversary present on your way
home later.Granted, this is all
emerging technology with immense room for improvement, but I can’t help but
feel that if my 30 year old Spectrum has the wherewithal to beat me at chess
then SL should be capable of algorithms a bit more complex than moving around
and not bumping into stuff.

We must, however, be careful in such considerations not to
forget the illusionary nature of SL.The
metaverse works not through precision accuracy in its emulation of the real
world, but because it exploits those psychological mechanisms within us which
cause us to identify with the primitive avatar on the screen.Our social brains just love filling in the
missing details.Despite everything I’ve
just said, for example, I have to admit that the rock monsters that chased me
across the hills of Linden Realms – essentially “navigating around the world
while avoiding obstacles” (obstacles other than me, that is) – really started
to annoy me after a while; when my skills at evading them grew to the point
where I could take on and outmanoeuvre two or even three of them at a time, my
sense of triumph was immense.I didn’t
go quite so far as to start throwing victory taunts in their direction, but to
deny even a little smug anthropomorphism on my part would be a bare-faced lie.

That’s the thing with SL; the subtle stuff immerses us more
than we imagine it might.A few days
ago, I rezzed a pre-scultpy bed I once made and was appalled that I ever even
contemplated the aesthetic qualities of a mattress without rounded
corners.Small things can make a big,
big difference.On the subject of beds, if
you’re still in any doubt about our capacity to create real experiences from
tiny detail, consider cybersex for a moment.If you’re anything like me, you probably considered the very idea
preposterous before you entered SL.

That I can’t really concretely visualise how objects
“navigating around the world while avoiding obstacles” is going to change my SL
is, for the time being, something I’m going to attribute purely to lack of
imagination on my part.I will await the
output of SL’s wonderfully creative community to show me how this will
happen.Of course, there will come a
time when once again such a basic thing will appear ridiculous and meaningless,
but that will only be because we’ve moved on from it to even more sophisticated
things.I did, after all, once think a mattress
with square corners looked okay.And I
was once prepared to put up with pre-rezzed sculpties making me look like the
Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

I say we’ll look back and think it ridiculous, however we
will of course by then be distracted by the more pressing concern of our
artificial avatars rising up to overthrow their human masters.I intend to start lavishing gifts upon my
avie right now, so that he’ll look favourably upon me when the revolution
comes.